Great Gatsby Cover Up!

London, UK based draping and dressing specialists Cover It Up (CIU) supplied and rigged a luxurious drape interior for the Gatsby Club, a fabulous VIP dining and social entertainment environment that ran during the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships.

Cover It Up was working for Detail, who specialise in providing high end facilities like this to prestigious sporting events. The venue, run by event hospitality specialists Keith Prowse for the duration of the Wimbledon Fortnight, was a 400 - 600 capacity glass fronted De Boer structure that was located in the grounds of the adjacent Wimbledon Cricket and Golf Club. The design was stamped with a sense of French style and flair, and the cuisine featured a special 3 course à la carte menu devised by Michelin star chef, Albert Roux.

The themed colours were spacious white, cool green and effervescent yellow - to capture all the elegance, fun and sense of occasion in the ultimate event dining experience. With the aid of flexible drape rig configurations, the room could also be sub-divided into different areas and tailored exactly to individual group booking requirements.

Cover It Up decked the space out using over 2000 metres of white trevira fabric, a myriad of voiles, plus other materials like white string curtains some of which were rigged on tab tracks for closing off the areas and changing the shape of the space, or for creating more private dining booths. The project was managed for CIU by Elliot Stennett, who worked closely with the interior designer. Stennett comments, "It was our first time working with Detail, and it was great to have such a creative brief and see it all come alive with outstanding results".

The private dining areas were separated by 6 metre drops of string curtain and their back walls were made out of stretched white trevira which was back lit with colour changing LED lighting.

The CIU team pre-rigged an extensive matrix of scaffolding tubing in the roof whilst the structure was being built to enable all the drapes to be rigged quickly and easily when the time came for the interior to be decked out. This involved some close liaison with the De Boers team, to ensure that they put all their 'marquee clamps' in the correct positions, onto which CIU's scaff pipes were attached, a process where there was no margin for error!

The project also included a large light-box ceiling centrepiece in the middle of the room, consisting of a 35 metre long 3 metre wide frame manufactured in Germany, with eye-catching 'mobiles' made from hand-blown green glass tiles hanging down at 2 metre intervals.

Once installed, the CIU crew dressed the frame in chroma-key green molton fabric on the outside and white on the inside. The 3 metre width meant that one piece of material could be used for the entire piece, avoiding the need for any seams, so it was completely smooth and looked great when stretched tight - a tricky operation, but one that worked perfectly. The bottom ends of the light-box were neatly finished with a wooden batten strip.

The full Gatsby Club interior installation process took a week, with Cover It Up supplying four crew. They spent three days on the rigging and installing the whites and then another two days working on the light box, with the help of two scissor platforms.

They also tidied up and masked various other elements of the set by dropping drapes in from the roof and clad the structural support columns running down the length of the venue in white trevira and voile to match the rest of the room.

It was a busy week for Detail and Cover it Up as they created another truly beautiful environment for the Royal Ascot Horse racing.